AT 27 the New York filmmaker Alex Ross Perry already has two features to his name, both notable for their eccentric ambition and estrangement from the larger landscape of American indie cinema — or perhaps their opposition to it. In a field where so many others are conditioned to produce work that is eager to please, Mr. Perry’s films — the oddball war movie “Impolex” (released last year) and the brother-sister psychodrama-comedy “The Color Wheel” (opening at BAMcinématek on Friday) — are determinedly individual and abrasive, even downright unassimilable.

“I see so many opportunities to do things in movies, and I don’t see them taken very often,” Mr. Perry said recently in an interview at a vegetarian cafe in the East Village where he used to take lunch breaks from his job at Kim’s Video, now defunct, on St. Marks Place. A fast talker with a sardonic deadpan that — both in person and on screen in “The Color Wheel” — vacillates between bravado and diffidence, Mr. Perry studied film production at New York University but credits his time at Kim’s, the film-educational gateway for generations of New Yorkers, as the more formative experience.

Mr. Perry said that while most of his fellow N.Y.U. students seemed oblivious to film history, he learned his most valuable lessons by combing the shelves at Kim’s and haunting repertory theaters. His movies, shot on 16-millimeter film, are clearly the work of a cinephile, and in his case that means someone who has not just seen a lot of films but also has a grand conviction in the possibilities of cinema — to exorcise personal demons, say, or capture the essence of a beloved, unadaptable book.

“Impolex,” the story of a young soldier wandering the woods after World War II in search of unexploded German weapons, was inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” but the stubbornly strange, hazy movie, despite evoking something of the book’s hallucinatory mood, is no one’s idea of a literary adaptation. “It’s like if I read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and had to write a high school book report on it, and then adapted that book report,” Mr. Perry said. “The best way to engage with this text was through filming what it meant to me and what it looked like in my head.”

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Alex Ross PerryCredit
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

“The Color Wheel” was also an attempt to work through something: an abstract sense of having grown apart from people he once knew, at the university or at high school in Bryn Mawr, Pa. Mr. Perry decided to tackle the themes of alienation and isolation by focusing on two adult siblings. As with “Impolex” the tone comes from a classic book; he read Philip Roth’s scabrous “Portnoy’s Complaint” while writing the screenplay. “It was at once absolutely hysterical and very sad,” Mr. Perry said. “It’s an ultimate statement on loneliness and sexual frustration.”

Like numerous other indies “The Color Wheel” could be described as a comic dysfunctional-family road trip, but it barely seems to exist on the same planet as “Little Miss Sunshine.” For one thing its New England motels and highways are shot in a grainy black-and-white that evokes the downbeat Americana of Robert Frank’s midcentury photographs. For another the film is a calculated affront to those who prefer their movie characters likable. The vicious, rapid-fire banter between sad-sack Colin (played by Mr. Perry) and flighty J. R. (Carlen Altman, his co-writer), by turns awkwardly funny and awkwardly unfunny, have more in common with the darkest screwball comedy than the passive-aggressive squirming of mumblecore.

Ms. Altman, who met Mr. Perry at a comedy show where they were both performing (it was his first time), said they immediately struck up a “jokey, teasing friendship,” which the film reflects. “We shared a sensibility of wanting things to be goofy and not esoteric,” she said.

Mr. Perry admitted that he took a sadistic pleasure in “making a goof” on a clichéd genre and “abusing the expectations” of audiences. But he said he also sees “The Color Wheel” as an experiment in identification, prompting viewers to question the basis of their discomfort: “I wanted to see if people could allow themselves to be embraced by something that’s unlikable and potentially upsetting.”

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Clip: ‘The Color Wheel’

A scene from "The Color Wheel," directed and co-written by Alex Ross Perry.

An important part of this experiment was to put himself at the center of it, and even, like some of his heroes, offer his own pathology for scrutiny. Referring to Mr. Roth and to Jerry Lewis and Vincent Gallo, kindred maestros of self-loathing and self-absorption, Mr. Perry said, “These are men who fearlessly and egomaniacally put themselves out there and become a target by allowing their face and their private persona to be open for discussion.”

“The Color Wheel” and “Impolex” take indirect paths to blindsiding climaxes. Each peaks with a nine-minute single-take sequence that redefines what came before. “I do hope there’s a tiny bit of mystery in both my films, which is: Why are these people acting this way?” Mr. Perry said.

It’s fitting that “The Color Wheel” has not taken a typical route to theaters. Sundance turned it down, and South by Southwest sent Mr. Perry what he termed a nasty rejection. The film had its premiere at the Sarasota Film Festival and went on to the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where it caught the attention of European critics. Stéphane Delorme, the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, wrote in an e-mail: “ ‘The Color Wheel’ reminds us of a New York independent cinema that we loved — black and white, shot on film, spontaneous, with funny and intelligent dialogue — and that seemed to no longer exist.” It is being released here not by a conventional distributor but by a new nonprofit, Cinema Conservancy, which supports American independent film culture.

Mr. Perry describes his next movie, “Listen Up Philip,” as “my New York narrative,” which he wrote in part to quash any overly romantic notions of the city. “It’s a place where everyone I’ve met has done everything they can to prevent me from succeeding, and I have succeeded despite that,” he said.

Mr. Perry has financed his films with money donated by childhood friends, and while he said he would relish a larger budget, he enjoys the full creative freedom of DIY endeavors. “I’ve never understood the lack of risk taking in this milieu of films that are self-financed,” he said. “Anybody who’s asking their family or friends for help to make their film: Why wouldn’t you make that film as crazy and personal as possible?”

A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 2012, on Page AR20 of the New York edition with the headline: Literary Influences, Personal Pathologies. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe